Simplicity is a form of art...

Creating a poor man central SCAP system

A few weeks ago, I was asked to give some explanation about how SCAP content can be used in companies to improve their infrastructure knowledge. The focus back then was to look at benchmarks (secure states) and violations, but other functionality should not be ignored. I'm not going to talk …

My application base: graphviz

Visualization of data is often needed in order to understand what the data means. When data needs to be visualized automatically, I often use the graphviz tools. Not that they are extremely pretty, but it works very well and is made to be automated.

Let me give a few examples …

My application base: LibreOffice

Of course, working with a Linux desktop eventually requires you to work with an office suite. Although I have used alternatives like AbiWord and Calligra in the past, and although I do think that Google Docs might eventually become powerful enough to use instead, I'm currently using LibreOffice.

The use …

My application base: firefox

Browsers are becoming application disclosure frameworks rather than the visualization tools they were in the past. More and more services, like the Draw.io one I discussed not that long ago, are using browsers are their client side while retaining the full capabilities of end clients (such as drag and …

My application base: bash and kiss tools

Okay, this just had to be here. I'm an automation guy - partially because of my job in which I'm responsible for the long-term strategy behind batch, scheduling and workload automation, but also because I believe proper automation makes life just that much easier. And for personal work, why not automate …

My application base: geekie

In the past, when I had to manage my images (pictures) I used GQview (which started back in 2008). But the application doesn't get many updates, and if an application does not get many updates, it either means it is no longer maintained or that it does its job perfectly …

My application base: freemind

Anyone who is even remotely busy with innovation will know what mindmaps are. They are a means to visualize information, ideas or tasks in whatever structure you like. By using graphical annotations the information is easier to look through, even when the mindmap becomes very large. In the commercial world …

Using extended attributes for custom information

One of the things I have been meaning to implement on my system is a way to properly "remove" old files from the system. Currently, I do this through frequently listing all files, going through them and deleting those I feel I no longer need (in any case, I can …

Public support channels: irc

I've said it before - support channels for free software are often (imo) superior to the commercial support that you might get with vendors. And although those vendors often try to use "modern" techniques, I fail to see why the old, but proven/stable methods would be wrong.

Consider the "Chat …

Enabling Kernel Samepage Merging (KSM)

When using virtualization extensively, you will pretty soon hit the limits of your system (at least, the resources on it). When the virtualization is used primarily for testing (such as in my case), the limit is memory. So it makes sense to seek memory optimization strategies on such systems. The …